Hearty thanks again to Ananova for this tremendously interesting story on the results of a Warwick University statistician's study of goalscoring in England versus the rest of the world. John Greenhough analysed the scores of over - count 'em - 135,000 football games in 169 countries, not getting out much in the process, and found that games with a total of more than 10 goals happen just once every 30 years in England.
"In general, they discovered, that low-scoring games seem to follow a random probability distribution and so bigger scores become increasingly unlikely - for example, there are more 1-1 draws or 2-0 victories than there are 6-1 victories."
Greenhough's conclusions? "The chances of a goal being scored change through a match and start to rely more on the number of previous near misses." And? "Teams worldwide are scoring more goals than they ought to be." Hmm. Hello? Are you still awake?
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